chown

Command

chown sets the user ID to owner
for the files and directories named by pathname arguments.
owner can be a user name from the user database, or a numeric
user ID.

If you include a group name (specify the owner
followed immediately by a colon (:) and group
with no intervening spaces, such as
owner:group),
chown also sets the group ID to group
for the files and directories named.

On 7/2008R2/8/2012/10/2016, you need appropriate permissions to use chown to
change the ownership of a file:

If you have "take ownership" permission (shown as WO or
writeowner by lsacl), you can make yourself
the owner.

If you have "take ownership" permission and you are an administrator, you
can make administrator the owner.

If you have the SE_TAKE_OWNERSHIP_NAME privilege, you can
bypass the fact that you do not have "take ownership permission",
and make yourself or administrator the owner.

If you have "restore" privilege, you can set the owner to anybody.

You can also specify owner in the form
domain\user, although this may not work
if you specify a domain other than your local machine domain.

When owner is the name of both a local user and the local
computer. chown assigns ownership to the local user.
To explicitly make the local computer the owner of a file, specify
computer_name/ or
computer_name\ (where computer_name
is the name of the local computer) as the value of owner.

does not issue an error message if chown cannot
change the owner.
In this case, chown always returns a status of zero.
Other errors may cause a non-zero return status.

-R

If a pathname on the command line is the name of a directory,
chown changes all the files and subdirectories under
that directory to belong to the specified owner (and
group, if :group is specified).
If chown cannot change some file or subdirectory under
the directory, it continues to try to change the other files and
subdirectories under the directory, but exits with a non-zero status.